Alina Stefanescu on Brandon Menke’s “Leather Idol," "Fleet June,"and "Ulticrostic"

Reading Brandon Menke, I imagined melodies in the margins, found instrumentation in his use of the field, marveled at the blurring between sensations and perceptive states. Each poem creates its own atmosphere, and subjects itself to the unique atmospheric pressure of its images, symbols, and sounds. 

"Leather Idol" opens with a single line, set on its own— "cybernetically eschutcheoned" (the reverb of that archaic verbed noun). Because Menke plays inside words, the multiple meanings of words matter. An escutcheon, for example, is a shield (or shield-like surface) on which a coat of arms is depicted, but it can also be an ornamental or protective plate around a keyhole, door handle, drawer pull, or light switch.1 The poem's speaker watches the leather idol move across the screen.2 The idol's BDSM gestures resemble the supplicative self-flagellation of saints and mystics.3 A pantomime of disco lyrics serves as both pulse and hymn (hymn being the melody that makes the ritual familiar). The word "lyric" lies before the quotation, and this use of order makes the gesture feel confessional – in the liturgical sense as opposed to the expository "I" of modern confessional poetics. I kept thinking of the edges—how the poem's eye moves across them, and how Roland Barthes insisted the edges are where the erotic annunciation occurs. The gaps between the edges prick us. This speaker is lonely— or maybe he's sold on "sex" and looking for something as raw as the sell of a Joe Henry song — as the field opens again to reveal the gape of the erotic. "Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?”, Barthes wondered.4 The gaping mouth resembles a gawk, at which point the poem references its marketability—the presence of money in relation to desire and desiring. The idol "points the way" and then leaves a gap, an opening of the field "with no hint of surety." Although I don't think Menke intended this, I was reminded of how Hervé Guibert makes palpable the presence of acmesthesia.5 The aísthēsis of hyper-real loops and getting-off, itself, a variant of the circular causal processes implied by cybernetics, an area of study "concerned with circular causal processes however they are embodied."6 And there is feedback involved—Norbert Wiener named cybernetics "after an example of circular causal feedback - that of steering a ship where the helmsman adjusts their steering in response to the effect it is observed as having, enabling a steady course to be maintained amongst disturbances such as cross-winds or the tide."7 In the poem, the snakeskin belt dangles from the door (I kept imagining the belt as the eschutcheoning object). Menke's alliteration fuses the erotic beck between things and shame ("buckle broken by the blush"), the constant worrying back-and-forth between the iconography of BDSM, and the virtual tenderness, the "plectra" clipped to voice "his strings," the tingling of the ropes, the chords on his neck, the anatomy, the song ending in a couplet, an indented temptation: “a duplicitous thrill. “

"Fleet June" opens into a landscape transformed by summer, the speaker and his partner more aware of their flesh due to the season's contamination by luscious colors. Nature moves, defines, inscribes— and this interaction between the subject and the landscape also appears formally, in how the text occupies the field, in the staggered couplets and the discipline of moving back and forth toward each other. The poem's temporality begins with the overwhelming of "jubilant minitrees" by the "orange mesh of the sand." The "river bluffs" elicit "expectations" which are spoken by the landscape; I shut my eyes to feel sand as I read, to be marked and implicated in it, and this makes sand's enmeshment palpable. "Pseudofossils,"a word that opens as it closes, a word that reaches outside of the time this June tends, positions the reader for the catalpas, the bluff, again overwhelmed by trees, the implication "thick//with marriage." Because words, like music, are more "fragile in the morning",8 I laid on my back in the grass and re-read "Fleet June," the paper positioned between my face and the sun, wondering how much the shadows of each letter in the poem weighed. Something remarkable happens when one reads this poem backwards, and begins at the end, in that "ripening." 

Ulticrostic9 is thick with the sorts of stacked, careening allusions that delight me. Shearing the husk of the ordinary acrostic ambition at the threshold, the poem unspools its own order. "Ulti" is short for "ultimate." An ultimate acrostic? A final acrostic? In an email, Menke called the ulticrostic "a falsely etymologized term" for a telestich.10 The poem, itself, feels elegiac in its address. "According with David Bowie's "Crystal Japan / Scatter these seeds and these ashes over the sea", the poem instructs the numinous You. The reference to Bowie's song here changed my reading of the poem, which is to say, I read it while listening to the piece Bowie composed back in 1980, the "Crystal Japan" and its mythos.11 "Parallel 12 / To a column of air" (air, ash, transposition, the eerie parallelism of Trent Reznor's "A Warm Place" came much later, on the darkest album Nine Inch Nails ever produced.13 As in "Fleet June," the speaker allows landscape and artistic allusion to do the speaking. The proliferation of the "Korean dogwood", for example, announces spring. There is "Auden pearling under alders" and "Schulyer in camellia light" — and there is a poem by James Schulyer that mentions "A camellia two stories tall, in full bloom: they fall whole and lie like cow flops on the grass."14 There is the surprise of the occasional end-rhyme. There is the alliterative assonance of "grease-slick gilt".  There are words that seem to carry more, scattered like seeds across the poem, "seeds" being one of these words; others being "presentment"; "your"; "waters"; "frothy"; "transposed"; "transmissions"; "attendant". And there is the hue of someone saying goodbye to something in Bowie-infused pastels, even at the end, with the presence of the seemingly-anachronistic Delphic oracles, the visible trace of earlier paintings beneath layers added by time, the evocative precision of Menke's words in their potential for reverberation, their verbing of reverb, or, to quote the final line of this poem: "the pentimenti of their glaucous words". Everything depends on the music beneath the line. Menke makes his own time. It is extraordinary.